In his popular article Easy Automated Snapshot-Style Backups with Linux and Rsync, Mike Rubel asserts that using rsync to create hard-linked snapshots with --link-dest is "a better way" to perform incremental backups than using --backup-dir, but he does not explain this statement.
I'm hoping to using rsync to create daily backups of about 1-2 GB of personal data from my laptop's $HOME directory. I would like a mirror of the current state of my files, plus some way to recover older versions of files (so I guess I want incremental backups).
What did Mike Rubel mean when he called his solution better than --backup-dir? What are the advantages/disadvantages of each solution? Which might be better for my situation?
Edit: I should clarify that the total size of the full backup would be 1-2 GB. Likely there will only be a few MB (or less) of new data each day. And I plan to back up to a local storage drive.
-b(--backup)? The article states that using-b --backup-dir=is the most common way (at the time the article was written) to perform incremental backups.